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THE PRESIDENT, AT NATIONAL PRESS CLUB, MAY 15, 1916. 



Mr. President and Gentlemen of the Press Club : 

I am both glad and sorry to be here; glad because I am always 
happy to be with you, and know and like so many of you, and sorry 
because I have to make a speech. One of the leading faults of you 
gentlemen of the press is your inordinate desire to hear other men 
talk, to draw them out upon all occasions, whether they wish to be 
drawn out or not. I remember being in this Press Club once before, 
making many unpremeditated disclosures of myself, and then hav- 
ing you with 3^our singular instinct for publicity insist that I should 
give it away to everybody else. 

I was thinking as I was looking forward to coming here this 
evening of that other occasion when I stood very nearly at the 
threshold of the duties that I have since been called upon to per- 
form, and I was going over in my mind the impressions that I then 
had by way of forecast of the duties of President and comparing 
them with the experiences that have followed. I must say that the 
forecast has been very largely verified, and that the impressions 1 
had then have been deepened rather than weakened. 

You may recall that I said then that I felt constantly a personal 
detachment from the Presidency; that one thing that I resented 
when I was not performing the duties of the office was being re- 
minded that I was the President of the United States. I felt tow^ard 
it as a man feels toward a great function which, in working hours, 
he is obliged to perform, but which, out of working hours, he is 
glad to get-away from and almost forget and resume the quiet 
course of his own thoughts. I am constantly reminded as I go about, 
as I do sometimes at the week end, of the personal inconvenience of 
being President of the United States. If I want to know how many 
people live in a small town all I have to do is to go there and they 
at once line up to be counted. I might, in a census-taking year, save 
the census takers a great deal of trouble by asking them to accom- 
pany me and count the people on the spot. Sometimes, when I am 

42847—16 



most beset, I seriously think of renting a pair of whiskers or of 
doing something else that will furnish me with an adequate dis- 
guise, because I am sorry to find that the cut of my jib is unmis- 
takable and that I must sail under false colors if I am going to 
sail incognito. 

Yet as I have matched my experiences with my anticipations, I, 
of course, have been aware that I Avas taken by surprise because of 
the prominence of many things to which I had not looked forward. 
When we are dealing with domestic affairs, gentlemen, we are deal- 
ing with things that to us as Americans are more or less calculable. 
There is a singular variety among our citizenship, it is true, a greater 
variety even than I had anticipated ; but, after all, we are all steeped 
in the same atmosphere, we are all surrounded by the same environ- 
ment, we are all more or less affected by the same traditions, and, 
moreover, we are working out something that has to be worked out 
among ourselves, and the elements are there to be dealt with at first 
hand. But when the fortunes of your own country are, so to say, 
subject to the incalculable winds of passion that are blowing through 
other parts of the world, then the strain is of a singular and unprece- 
dented kind, because you do not know by what turn of the wheel of 
fortune the control of things is going to be taken out of your hand ; 
it makes no difference how deep the passion of the Nation lies, that 
passion may be so overborne by the rush of fortune in circumstances 
like those which now exist that you feel the sort of — I had almost 
said resentment that a man feels when his own affairs are not within 
his own hands. You can imagine the strain upon the feeling of 
any man who is trying to interpret the spirit of his country when 
he feels that that spirit can not have its own way beyond a certain 
point. And one of the greatest points of strain upon me, if I may 
be permitted to point it out, was this : 

There are two reasons why the chief wish of America is for peace. 
One is that they love peace and have nothing to do Avith the present 
quarrel; and the other is that they believe the present quarrel has 
carried those engaged in it so far that they can not be held to ordi- 
nary standards of responsibility, and that, therefore, as some men 
have expressed it to me, since the rest of the world is mad, why 
should we not simply refuse to have anything to do with the rest 
of the world in the ordinary channels of action? Why not let the 

D. of D. 
JUN IS 1916 



storm pass, and then, when it is all over, have the reckonings? 
Knowing that from both these two points of view the passion of 
America was for peace, I was, nevertheless, aware that America is 
one of the Nations of the world, not only, but one of the chief 
Nations of the world — a Nation that grows more and more powerful 
almost in spite of herself; that grows morally more and more in- 
fluential even when she is not aware of it ; and that if she is to play 
the part which she most covets, it is necessary that she should act 
more or less from the point of view of the rest of the world. If I 
can not retain my moral influence over a man except by occasionally 
knocking him down, if that is the only basis upon which he will 
respect me, then for the sake of his soul I have got occasionally 
to knock him down. You know how we have read in — isn't it in 
Ralph Connor's stories of western life in Canada? — that all his 
sky pilots are ready for a fracas at any time, and how the ultimate 
salvation of the souls of their parishioners depends upon their using 
their fists occasionally. If a man will not listen to you quietly in a 
seat, sit on his neck and make him listen; just as I have always main- 
tained, particularly in view of certain experiences of mine, that the 
shortest road to a boy's moral sense is through his cuticle. There 
is a direct and, if I may be permitted the pun, a fundamental con- 
nection between the surface of his skin and his moral consciousness. 
You arrest his attention first in that way, and then get the moral 
lesson conveyed to him in milder ways that, if he were grown up, 
would be the only ways you would use. 

So I say that I have been aware that in order to do the very thing 
that we are proudest of the ability to do, there might come a time 
when we w^ould have to do it in a Avay that we w^ould prefer not 
to do it; and the great burden on my spirits, gentlemen, has been 
that it has been up to me to choose when that time came. Can you 
imagine a thing more calculated to keep a man awake at nights 
than that? Because, just because I did not feel that I was the 
whole thing and was aware that my duty was a duty of interpreta- 
tion, how could I be sure that I had the right elements of informa- 
tion by which to interpret truly? 

What we are now talking about is largely spiritual. You say, 
"All the people out my way think so and so." Now, I know per- 
fectlv well that vou have not talked Avith all the people out your 



Avay. I find that out again and again. And so you are taken by sur- 
prise. Tlie people of the United States are not asking anybody's 
leave to do their own thinking, and are not asking anybody to tip 
them off what they ought to think. They are thinking for them- 
selves, every man for himself; and you do not know, and, the worst 
of it is, since the responsibility is mine, I do not know what they are 
thinking about. I have the most imperfect means of finding out, 
and yet I have got to act as if I knew. That is the burden of it, and 
I tell you, gentlemen, it is a pretty serious burden, particularly if 
you look upon the office as I do — ^that I am not put here to do what 
I please. If I were, it would have been very much more interesting 
than it has been. I am put here to interpret, to register, to suggest, 
and, more than that, and much greater than that, to be suggested to. 
Now, that is where the experience that I forecast has differed from 
the experience that I have had. In domestic matters I think I can in 
most cases come pretty near a guess where the thought of America 
is going, but in foreign affairs the chief element is where action is 
going on in other quarters of the world and not where thought is 
going in the United States. Therefore, I have several times taken 
the liberty of urging upon you gentlemen not yourselves to know 
inore than the State Department knows about foreign affairs. Some 
of you have shown a singular range of omniscience, and certain 
things have been reported as understood in administrative circles 
wliich I never heard of until I read the newspapers. I am constantly 
taken b}' surprise in regard to decisions which are said to be my own, 
and this gives me an uncomfortable feeling that some providence is 
at work with which I have had no communication at all. Now, that 
is pretty dangerous, gentlemen, because it happens that remarks start 
fires. There is tinder lying everywhere, not only on the other side of 
the water, but on this side of the water, and a man that spreads 
sparks may be responsible for something a great deal worse than 
burning a town on the Mexican border. Thoughts may be bandits. 
Thoughts may be raiders. Thoughts may be invaders. Thoughts 
may be disturbers of international peace ; and when you reflect upon 
the importance of this country keeping out of the present war, you 
will ImoAv Avhat tremendous elements we are all dealing with. We 
are all in the same boat. If somebody does not keep the processes of 
peace going, if somebody does not keep their passions disengaged. 



by what impartial judgment and suggestion is the world to be aided 
to a solution when the whole thing is over? If you are in a con- 
ference in which you know nobody is disinterested, how are you 
going to make a plan ? I tell you this gentlemen, the only thing that 
saves the world is the little handful of disinterested men that are 
in it. 

Now, I have found a few disinterested men. I wish I had found 
more. I can name two or three men with whom I have conferred 
again and again and again, and I have never caught them by an 
inadvertance thinking about themselves for their own interests, and 
1 tie to those men as you would tie to an anchor. I tie to them as 
you would tie to the voices of conscience if you could be sure that 
you always heard them. Men who have no axes to grind ! Men 
Avho love America so that they would give their lives for it and never 
care whether anybody heard that they had given their lives for it; 
willing to die in obscurity if only they might serve ! Those are the 
men, and nations like those men are the nations that are going to 
serve the Avorld and save it. There never was a time in the history 
of the world when character, just sheer character all by itself, told 
more than it does now, A friend of mine says that every man who 
takes office in Washington either grows or swells, and when I give a 
man an office, I watch him carefully to see whether he is swelling or 
growing. The mischief of it is that when they swell they do not 
swell enough to burst. If they would only swell to the point where 
you might insert a pin and let the gases out, it would be a great 
delight. I do not know any pastime that would be more diverting, 
except that the gases are probably poisonous so that we would have 
to stand from under. But the men who grow, the men who think 
better a year after they are put in office than they thought when they 
were put in office, are the balance wheel of the whole thing. They 
lire the ballast that enables the craft to carry sail and to make port 
in the long run, no matter what the weather is. 

So I have come willing to make this narrative of experience to you. 
I have come through the fire since I talked to you last. Whether the 
metal is purer than it was, God only knows ; but the fire has been there, 
the fire has penetrated every part of it, and if I may believe my own 
thoughts I have less partisan feeling, more impatience of party 
maneuver, more enthusiasm for the right thing, no matter whom it 



hurts, than I ever had before in my life. And I have something 
that it is no doubt dangerous to have, but that I can not help having. 
I have a profound intellectual contempt for men who can not see 
the signs of the times. I have to deal with some men who know no 
more of the modern processes of politics than if they were living in 
the eighteenth century, and for them I have a profound and compre- 
hensive intellectual contempt. They are blind. They are hopelessly 
blind ; and the worst of it is I have to spend hours of my time talking 
to them when I know before I start as much as after I have finished 
that it is absolutely useless to talk to them. I am talking in vacuo. 
The business of every one of us, gentlemen, is to realize that if we 
are correspondents of papers who have not yet heard of modern 
times we ought to send them as many intimations of modern move- 
ments as they are willing to print. There is a simile that was used 
by a very interesting English writer that has been much in my 
mind. Like myself, he had often been urged not to try to change 
so many things. I remember when I was president of a university 
a man said to me, " Good heavens, man, why don't you leave some- 
thing alone and let it stay the way it is?" And I said, "If you 
will guarantee to me that it will stay the way it is I will let it alone; 
but if you knew anything you would Imow that if you leave a live 
thing alone it will not stay where it is. It will develop and will 
either go in the wrong direction or decay." I reminded him of 
this thing that the English writer said, that if you want to keep a 
white post white you can not let it alone. It will get black. You 
have to keep doing something to it. In that instance you have got 
to keep painting it white, and you have got to paint it white very 
frequently in order to keep it w^hite, because there are forces at 
work that will get the better of you. Not only will it turn black, but 
the forces of moisture and the other forces of nature will penetrate 
the white paint and get at the fiber of the wood, and decay will set 
in, and the next time you try to paint it you will find that there is 
nothing but punk to paint. Then you will remember the Red Queen 
in "Alice in Wonderland," or "Alice Through the Looking Glass "— 
I forget which, it has been so long since I read them — who takes 
Alice by the hand and they rush along at a great pace, and then 
when they stop Alice looks around and says, " But we are just where 



we were when we started." " Yes," says the Red Queen, " you have 
to run twice as fast as that to get anywhere else." 

That is also true, gentlemen, of the world and of affairs. You 
have got to run fast merely to stay where you are, and in order to 
get anywhere, you have got to run twice as fast as that. That is 
what people do not realize. That is the mischief of these hopeless 
dams against the stream known as reactionaries and standpatters, 
and other words of obloquy. That is what is the matter with them ; 
they are not even staying where they were. They are sinking fur- 
ther and further back in what will sometime comfortably close 
over their heads as the black waters of oblivion. I sometimes 
imagine that I see their heads going down, and I am not inclined 
even to throw them a life preserver. The sooner they disappear, the 
better. We need their places for people who are awake; and we 
particularly need now, gentlemen, men who will divest themselves 
of party passion and of personal preference and will try to think in 
the terms of America. If a man describes himself to me now in 
any other terms than those terms, I am not sure of him ; and I love 
the fellows that come into my office sometimes and say, " Mr. Presi- 
dent, I am an American." Their hearts are right, their instinct true, 
they are going in the right direction, and will take the right leader- 
ship if they believe that the leader is also a man who thinks first of 
America. 

You will see, gentlemen, that I did not premeditate these re- 
marks, or they would have had some connection with each other. 
They would have had some plan. I have merely given myself the 
pleasure of telling you what has really been in my heart, and not 
only has been in my heart but is in my heart every day of the week. 
If I did not go off at week ends occasionally and throw off, as much 
as it is possible to throw off, this burden, I could not stand it. This 
week I went down the Potomac and up the James and substituted 
history for politics, and there was an infinite, sweet calm in some 
of those old places that reminded me of the records that were made 
in the days that are past; and I comforted myself with the recollec- 
tion that the men we remember are the disinterested men who gave 
us the deeds that have covered the name of America all over with 
the luster of imperishable glory. 

O 



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